How to Improve Your Social Media Presence and Use Storytelling to Boost Your Social Media Following
When you decided to act on your want for social media and created an Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and/or any other social media you may have, your first set of followers were a mixture of friends and family, I assume. Why do I assume this you ask? Because, off of my own experience (as well as analyzing others over the years), one finds out about social media through word of mouth. I, myself have convinced multiple friends to make a Twitter, while I’ve had friends convince me to make a Snapchat. Why am I mentioning all of this you ask? Because! It’s easy to gain followers on social media. The problem is keeping them.
Everyone has their own story to tell; their own brand that they want to build, but its not about the story you’re telling, its about the way you tell it and the audience you’re telling it to.
For example, I have a close friend majoring in exercise science. For about 7 years now, she’s been on this weightless journey but for the first five years, she wasn’t getting any attention. She tried to get people to engage in her Instagram posts, she’d post progress pictures and she had even started training someone who also aimed to lose weight but she remained at the same state, with only 267 followers. Over those five years, she only went up 83 followers, who were mostly more friends and family that she found. Because of her lack of progress on social media, this too affected her weight loss. To get to the root of the problem, we decided to sit down and analyze everything, and in doing so realized there were more problems than anticipated. Of course nothing that couldn’t be fixed.
For starters, her profile was private. You usually don’t get as many followers with a private profile as you would with a public one. She claimed her profile was private because she didn’t only post fitness posts but her own personal posts as well. That’s where it starts. If you choose to be an influencer or promote yourself as a brand, you have to be careful to post things that wouldn’t defame you. Also, no one likes a scattered story. Your profile is your story so it may be confusing to others if you are a fashion blog page majority of the time, but every now and then you decide to post reviews on different soft drinks and pens. Doing that just shows your followers that you are unsure of your path giving them a reason to pass on your page. Direction leads to consistency which lead to our next problem:
She wasn’t consistent with her posts. Consistency is key when building a social media presence. People like to see that you’’ll appear on their timeline frequently and not just once in a blue moon. Scattered posts give them enough time to forget about you. Also, with inconsistency comes gaps within your story. Your social media page is your story about you and what you want to share with the world so always sharing something fresh and new in a timely pattern will be sure to get you some new followers that’ll stick around.
Next, we found that she lacked description. She either wouldn’t caption her photos of just used a random emoji. Storytelling is literally you telling a story and the easiest way to do that on social media is by captioning your posts to grab the viewers attention. Also, whatever you post with the caption has to relate with each other. It shouldn’t be a post saying “I love watermelon,” with a picture of a kangaroo.
Along with captioning your photos should be hashtags. These are the best way for someone to find your page because a simple hashtag can connect your story to someone else’s. A good story is well thought out, planned, and may sometimes have to go through trial and error until it’s perfect. Think of your social media presence in this way and you’ll be sure to grow a larger audience and gain more followers.
